From New York to Texas to Alabama, law enforcement officials have warned for years that relaxing gun laws would lead to more violence toward police. The fatal shooting of a local police officer and three members of a fugitive task force in Charlotte,

From the shade of a banana tree, Samuel Isingoma explains why he is sacrificing his precious jackfruit to chimpanzees. “Since I support and give fruit to the chimps, they don’t disturb anything else,” says Mr. Isingoma, who has planted 20 jackfruit t

Panic is setting in across Rafah. Even as talks seeking an Israel-Hamas cease-fire enter a crucial stage this week, hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians are scrambling to find a way out of this cramped southern Gaza border city – and findi

The protest movement roiling college campuses across the United States appeared to enter a more dangerous phase Tuesday, as student demonstrators who had barricaded themselves inside a hall at Columbia University were arrested overnight by police in

In one of the world’s most violent crises – which is considered by the United States to be as important as the wars in Gaza and Ukraine – a solution may have started last Thursday. Haiti’s prime minister, forced into exile by the nation’s powerful ga

Shawntell Fitzgerald is convinced that with the right kind of help in school, she could have learned to read. Instead, she says, teachers in Milwaukee’s public schools moved her on from grade to grade, even filling in her answers on tests at times. N

The Middle East is seized by two conflicting moods this week: hope that a flurry of diplomacy has brought a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas within reach, and dread over the consequences should the talks fail. With parallel talks being conducted i

As violent organized crime spreads more widely across South America, events in two countries – Ecuador and Colombia – illustrate how the region has become a laboratory for divergent approaches to peace and security. In Ecuador, voters overwhelmingly

Who are we? How do we decide what’s important to us – and become who we are? What’s a “real” American? These are some of the questions Rachel Khong probes in “Real Americans,” her riveting, multi-generational saga about class, race, genetics, values,

A woman in Australia, it turns out, knows exactly what is needed to fix democracy. "There should be longer terms of government to promote longer-term vision," she told a recent survey by the Pew Research Center. That makes sense. People need time to

Disgraced film producer Harvey Weinstein won a legal victory last week when his 2020 convictions for felony sex crimes, including rape, were overturned by a New York Court of Appeals. But experts say the reversal falls far short of erasing the hard-w

An interesting thing happened as some of us at the Monitor were discussing this week’s cover story. We had an argument. Not an "I'm going to go away and write terrible things about you on social media" kind of argument. But the good kind – a sharing

Will American teens lose their access to TikTok? Should they? A new law that could ban the video app – a platform especially popular with youth – unless it is sold by Chinese owner ByteDance, moves the former question closer to an answer. But the lat

For Laura Veirs, cycling was a time for crying. It was 2018. Few would have suspected that the songwriter’s life was unraveling. Two years earlier, a supergroup collaboration with Neko Case and k.d. lang had elevated her profile. Her latest solo albu

It was a Friday afternoon in October 2020, and Coralie, a junior high school French teacher at Collège du Bois d’Aulne, had just gone for a walk in the nearby woods with her dog to clear her mind before the two-week school vacation. It had been a str

In July 2017 then-President Donald Trump asked National Enquirer publisher David Pecker to a White House dinner to thank him for his help in the 2016 presidential campaign. The event was “for you,” President Trump told the tabloid boss, and he could

Thirty minutes into the library tour, Louisa Sarpee wants to work there. History is so close to her. One block away from her high school, the small library she had never set foot in laid the foundation of African American librarianship. What is more,

When Minouche Shafik was appointed as the 20th president of Columbia University last July, she was asked to describe her leadership style. The Egyptian-born, U.S.-educated economist told the school’s alumni magazine that she wouldn’t be seeking the s

Soon after Olympic swimmer Lydia Jacoby won her first gold medal in 2021 at the Tokyo Games, she graced the winners’ podium in a white tracksuit, her red hair tied up in a bun and her face hidden – under an N95 mask. Because of COVID-19 restrictions,

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken urged China on Friday to curb the flow to Russia of Chinese dual-use equipment critical to Moscow’s war efforts in Ukraine – or face fresh sanctions. “Russia would struggle to sustain its assault on Ukraine with

A historical term in geopolitics – the Great Game, or when big powers fought to control the heartland of the Eurasian supercontinent – may need to be retired. Over the past two years, many countries in Central Asia and the Caspian basin have seen a f

Years before Hamas fighters stormed Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing hundreds of civilians, John Eaves saw a rise in antisemitism in the United States. He saw racism against American Black people, too. As a member of both the Black and Jewish communit

The letter C might be for Climate Change. But it is also for Complicated. And Challenging.  Such is the take-away from “H Is for Hope: Climate Change From A to Z.” This alphabetical collection of essays, written by Elizabeth Kolbert and vividly illus

In the last case to be argued before the U.S. Supreme Court this term, the justices once again heard from former President Donald Trump, this time to consider a question that strikes at a foundational principle of American democracy. Just how excepti

The American diplomat could not have been clearer: This war must end, he said. “We need to be seeing massive convoys of aid” for its desperately vulnerable civilians. He was not talking about Gaza. Veteran U.S. diplomat Tom Perriello was addressing a

A year ago, Sam Schultz was enjoying retirement in this remote, high-desert community that hugs California’s border with Mexico. He, his wife, Gabrielle, and their two adult sons, nine dogs, multiple cats, chickens, and peacocks live on a compound th